Electrifying Transit
a guidebook for implementing battery electric buses
year
Internship - Summer 2018
Published - April 2021
role
lead author + researcher
Opportunity
The use of battery electric bus (BEB) fleets is becoming more attractive to cities seeking to reduce emissions and traffic congestion. BEB fleets may provide benefits such as lower fuel and maintenance costs, improved performance, lower emissions, and energy security. Despite growing demand, no comprehensive guidebook for policy makers and transit agencies existed.
Goal
Consolidate and organize contemporary BEB research and literature into a streamlined, usable guidebook so stakeholders feel confident and competent planning for their own BEB deployment.
Challenges
Upfront cost premiums
BEB range
Charging infrastructure
Unfamiliarity with BEB technology
Complex planning
Stakeholders
Policymakers
Transit Agencies
Utilities
City Planners
Bus OEMs
phase 1
collecting the information
As a starting point, I interviewed internal BEB researchers at NREL to get an idea of the main categories of BEB roll out, and then spoke with transit agencies and BEB OEMs to get an idea their pain points and existing processes.
The next step was compiling relevant and recent BEB data and creating a bibliography of 104 documents.
literature
review
interviews
phase 2
coding + organizing the data
How do we organize the information so stakeholders can easily shift between macro project planning to micro technical details?
While the bulk of the information landed in the technical details category, policy makers and transit agencies needed a way to understand how these variables influence each other. To do this, I created example scenarios and route analysis frameworks for multiple variables simultaneously. The final need was a way to envision all the variables simultaneously in relation to a timeline.
Color Key
summary, flowchart that frames all the information
facts, data, examples
need for hypothetical scenarios, analysis frameworks
relate and visualize all variables simaltaneously in relation to time and stakeholder involvement
organize the huge amount of technical data so it's easy to navigate and flows thoughtfully
relate multiple variables through example scenarios and create route analysis frameworks
Categorizing + Color Coding
Organizing variables for route analysis and project execution map
results
a comprehensive guidebook for implementing battery electric buses, published 2021 through the National Renewable Energy Lab in collaboration with The United States Agency for International Development. Cited on the U.S. Department of Transportation's Electric Bus page.
example
example
example
